Tutors Theorizing the Writing Center :: Education Learning Papers

Central to the theorizing that is current in indite promenade scholarship is the concept of collaboration amidst passenger vehicles and students. Beca employ of the overarching framework of amicable constructivism that currently drives theorizing in a multitude of disciplinese.g., composition, literature, history, sociology, anthropologyit is not surprising that compose center scholars also use this framework to question the kind of noesis that tutors create in tutorial sessions (see Grimm 1999, Murphy 1995, Carino 1995, Hobson 1994). Are tutors simply replicating the hierarchical paradigms of knowledge construction in which academia seems to be fully invested? Or argon they capable of thinking outside the box because they are peers quite an than teachers? My interest in how tutors theorize their practice in the paper center and how the compose center literature theorizes itself has been central to my work as a writing center director for the past 10 years. The small unaff ixed arts college where I teach and direct the writing center has a staff of all-female undergraduate tutors, and I am constantly surprised by their fresh take on writing center surmise and practice. They are bright and they question everything. Since this is exactly what a womens college should be precept young women to do, I encourage that stance in our writing center, and particularly in the course tutors are required to take with me before they flummox tutoring. In this paper, I will examine tutors journal responses written during a tutor training class held in the Fall of 2003. In these responses, tutors suffice directly to articles which are often considered central to checking the concepts of collaboration, control, socially constructed knowledge, and the writing center as a site of resistance--concepts upon which writing center theory is often built. An important aspect of these journals is that they are dialogic. That is, they are entered on a Blackboard discussion for um that allows each tutor to read the some other tutors journals and respond to them. The tutors responses seem to reveal a gap between what tutors understand about their own tutorial practices and what theorists believe to be true. In examining the tutors responses, I find that theorists sometimes recast practice to fit their theoretical constructs as a result, tutors do not always see the same connections between theory and practice that theorists do. By listening to tutors voices as they critique writing center theory, I believe we can better understand how to use theory as a jumping off place for tutor training, rather than as an ending point.